


Kounteya

by toujours_nigel



Category: Mahabharata - Vyasa
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-12-16
Updated: 2014-12-16
Packaged: 2018-03-01 19:16:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2784617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/pseuds/toujours_nigel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Maybe, in the universe-next-door, Kunti doesn't float him down a river.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

I came to consciousness when I was six. It was a moment’s work, some quiet words unmaking and making my life. It has been the work of a lifetime, and it seems at times as though I am still reeling under the impact of that moment, stumbling back only to be captured in the implacable grip of my grandfather’s hands, and my grandfather’s eyes that are my mother’s eyes that are my eyes. All my life, I shall stand there, held immobile between the callused hands of King Kuntibhoj—all I remember of my life has unspooled from that moment, all my selves issued from the fragile, unmarked body of that child.

It is not that I remember nothing of the days before that day—I remember standing, stumbling, falling; I remember the voices of my friends raised in quick laughter and quicker rage; I remember, sometimes with a vicious sorrow, the taste of the payasam wherein my indulgent nurse crumbled extra pieces of jaggery, especially for me. That last is almost the only bit of favouritism I can remember—the special payasam on my name-day, and on one other day, every year, the significance of which was never explained to me. I never asked her, always in a hurry to bolt the treat and rejoin my friends. I had friends in those days, a dozen, three dozen friends. I cannot remember their names, now; if I brushed past one I would not recognise his face. Yet in those days I was never alone, save when I was being fed my biannual treat—was it sweeter for the jaggery, or the solitude?—I had company even in my sleep, and in my waking hours I was always part of a horde, simply a face in the crowd of palace children, the sons and daughters of maids and courtesans and concubines, the bastards of courtiers and princes. We were never a particularly well-organised group; hierarchy was established by strange combinations of strength and guile, and alliances were every day formed and every hour betrayed. But those days are as golden in my memory as they are mercifully vague—a riot of laughter where the cause has been obscured over the years—and I cannot remember an hour when I was wholly miserable, though I cannot remember an hour when I was wholly ecstatic. No extremes were demanded of me—nothing was demanded of me that was not demanded of all my companions, I was simply one of an unexceptional crowd. If the boys were the sons of princes and generals, their fathers sometimes took an interest in them when they were old enough to wield weapons; if the girls were pretty, they were sent off as part of their legitimate sisters’ dowries, to serve as companion to the girl and nurse to her children; but the children were left largely to their own devices, handed punishment and reward in equal measure by indifferent adults. If they knew our parentage, they never deemed it important enough to accord us appropriate treatment—I doubt, still, how many of us knew our fathers, and how many of our fathers knew the children they’d spawned.

Or so it was in the house of King Kuntibhoj, when I was a child there. Every house has its own way of dealing with those of my ilk, children who can neither be set afloat or drowned, nor be acknowledged. In Hastinapura, Queen Gandhari knows all the children of her husband, and of her sons, and of their cousins, and of their friends. They walk in the halls, arm in arm with each other, and stand as counsellors to their fathers and brothers. Perhaps that lends Hastinapura the openness that still endears it to me—the day we first saw it, I found my eyes drawn to the height of the windows, to the high ceilings and fluted pillars, and everywhere the lights, catching on the copper bangles of the serving-girls and the diamonds in the princes’ ears. My brothers who had lived their lives in forests, my brothers found it small—they have found every palace small, even in Indraprastha they were only truly happy in the gardens. But I, who still remembered the cloistering walls and crenulated turrets of my first home, found it strange, found it nearly a miracle that a palace should be so permissive of the movements of air and light. And my mother, who had spent fifteen years in those rooms, where I had spent six, she knew the amazement in my eyes, and found a smile from beneath the cold armour she wore against her enemies—even besieged, even hated, we thought Hastinapura a relief, after that house of whispered secrets.

I was three, when first I knew that the whispers sometimes concerned me, and four before I knew how best to make myself unobtrusive enough to successfully eavesdrop. I learnt many things from those conversations—how this lord or that captain liked his rooms and his food, how that princess wore her hair in a particular way to hide the blemishes on her forehead, how such a boy had been whipped for laming the finance minister’s favourite horse. They knew everything, these women who went about the palace with their eyes averted and their heads bent. They knew about me, too, and let slip words that contributed only to my swirling confusion. Two years’ careful gleaning told me only that my mother had been a beauty and, by all counts, a virtuous girl; that she had been young when my father had caught sight of her; that he had been too powerful to be denied; that she had decided to drown me and found herself unable to do so. Of everything I learnt, only one surprised me—that she had wed, and that she had left me while she went to her husband’s home. Till my sixth name-day, I had thought her dead. I learnt the truth while I sat hunched in the warm shadow of a squat pillar, holding my breath lest I give away my hiding-place and so be found. I was three months past six years, then, and playing hide-and-seek in the women’s quarters. I had hidden in the rooms that had belonged to Princess Kunti—the rooms were forbidden to us, but I had never been scolded, though I’d been spotted entering them before: another unexplained indulgence. That day, too, I was discovered by an adult—by the Princess’ Dhai, who set a hand on my head and steered me out by it, hauling me in her wake out to the gardens, her generous, wrinkled mouth pressed in a tight line.

She glared at my bent head till I raised my eyes to hers, and twisted her mouth into an exasperated smile. “What those girls were thinking,” she grumbled, and, the smile growing a little, “I know what they were thinking, that the charioteer has strong arms and bright eyes, that’s what they were thinking, stupid sluts.” She twisted her hand from my curls, tugging slightly, and left me alone in the gathering dark. There was a hesitation in her steps—she stopped at the base of the asoka tree, like a girl on her way to an assignation taking a last look at the home she’s leaving behind—but I was too young, too unimportant for the attention of a personage like her. Then, too, she had urgent tasks pressing for her attention—that morning a chariot had come pelting down from Princess Kunti’s forest home, bearing messages for her father from her husband, and the whole palace was in a state of carefully controlled chaos.

The next morning, I was summoned to private audience with the King. I had spent much of the night staring at the close darkness of the ceiling, shifting restlessly under the heavy arm of my companion, trying to puzzle out the mystery of my mother’s marriage. The palace women rarely married—I had grown up seeing the mothers of my friends clad in diaphanous chiffons and crisp cottons, their hair braided and beaded, their mouths painted, bent gracefully in dance and conversation with courtiers who professed enchantment. I could count on the fingers of one hand those I had seen in bridal veils, though as many of my friends were the flowering of a life’s affection as were the fruit of a night’s passion—one could tell, by how often their mothers decked themselves in alluring jewels. Even those who wed never deserted their children—only a month before a friend had gone to the house of his mother’s husband, to be brought up there as his own, though of course everyone knew he belonged to the captain of the third cavalry company. Who had my mother wed, that she had not taken me with her? Had her husband objected? Had she not wanted me? Had she not told him? Had my father objected? But then, I did not know my father, and did not know whether he even knew his son was being brought up in the house of King Kuntibhoj. And the men who married palace women knew they must take any children their wives had left alive. And the palace women killed—before they were born, or just after—those children they did not wish to keep.

It was a puzzle that defeated me—easily enough, since I had no idea of the truth, only garbled words I’d strung together in my wishes—and kept me awake while the guard changed twice in a great clashing of swords. The third was the roaring of storm-clouds in my dreams as I stood unprotected in the drenching rain, and the fourth a back-beat to the tinkling of bangles beside my ear. I opened eyes in the pre-dawn gloom, and peered up into the worried face of my nurse. She clamped a hand over my mouth and pulled me from my bed—I was barely up before the boy beside me had rolled into the warm depression my body had left in the mattress. She scrubbed her aanchal roughly over my face, smoothed her hand over my hair in a futile attempt to make it behave. She herself was half-asleep, her hair falling in tangles around her face, her sari draped hurriedly. She had woken me on orders, been tumbled out of bed as she’d pulled me. The Princess’ Dhai was in a carved chair by the doors, looking like nothing as much as one of the sentries carved into the dark wood of the dungeon doors, behind and before which the sentries paraded day and night, eyes alert and arms ready, forbidden sleep on pain of death. She looked like they looked, her eyes swollen and red, exhaustion carved into her face.

She looked at me with a pained, sceptic eye, and turned on my nurse with a frustrated rage that made her grip fingers tighter into my shoulders, pressing metal into my flesh. “Is this the best you can do? Has he been bathed? Has he been washed? Has he had his ornaments put on him? Does he look fit to be brought before a King?”

I had no ornaments—ornaments were the province of children with mothers, with indulgent fathers who showered gifts on them and dandled them in their arms and took them riding and dancing and fighting. I had only the kavach-kundal I had never been without, that had adapted to my growth, and grown as a second skin. I opened my mouth to protest my nurse’s innocence, and gulped it shut at the Dhai’s glare, and the name of the King. I had done nothing to deserve such grave punishment, surely, only gone into the Princess’ rooms when they were open and empty—they had been empty five years, since she married Pandu. And I had done it before, too, and had not even been reprimanded. Perhaps they had been indulgent, perhaps they had been waiting for a repeat of the same offense. Perhaps some concubine with a long-held grudge against my unknown mother had told tales of me, exaggerating my errors till they resembled the worst sins. Perhaps my mother had herself been the child of a palace woman, and had gone to her sister’s home with her, and had now been allowed to send for me.

 

 

The King’s rooms were dark, and dank, and cold with whispered conspiracy. I had seen the King before, as a mass of white hair beneath a crown, above broad shoulders stooped with care and time. I had not thought his jaw would be so firm, or his eyes so piercing. I felt like running, when he fixed those eyes on me, but the Dhai had pushed me through the doors and closed them. I was alone, with the King, I who had never ventured close even to cavalry captains.

“Come closer,” the King said, and again, and again, and again, till my knees were knocking against the raised base of his wolf-headed throne. In an ecstasy of fear I tried to inch even closer, turning my eyes up to his hypnotic gaze. I had never looked at anyone thus, with such stern anger, and such bemused affection lurking beneath. Yet it seemed impossible I had not, for looking into the King’s eyes was as looking into my own in a limpid pool, misted over with the trials of a long life lived fruitfully. All our family has those eyes, my brothers and my mother and her nephews and her brother and their father and his brothers—often they are the only feature shared, even among brothers from the same womb, those great dark eyes with their long curling lashes. To me, then, it seemed proof absolute of some great disaster only dimly guessed at; it oppressed me like a great predator pressing a paw with infinite gentleness against my flesh, bearing me down into the ground with quiet ease. I fell back under it, my knees crumpling, sinking to the ground before the throne like the lowest of supplicants—something in me rebelled against it, but all else was shuddering. He put his hands on me, wrapped them around my shoulders and pulled me up and pulled me forward till my body was pressed against his knees, then put a hand on my back to hold me, and a hand in my hair to tip my face up into his, pull my eyes again into his great, mirroring ones. I closed mine, and he laughed. “You’ve her mind behind her eyes,” he said, and there was no humour in his voice, only bitter satisfaction, “for surely that’s none of mine, that twisted path your thoughts are taking, and you a child of... how old are you?”

“Six,” I murmured. His hand in my hair had turned caressing, and I felt soothed, like a skittish colt held in steady hands.

“So old?” He had stopped speaking to me, he had stopped seeing me before him, but the child he held in his mind had, perhaps, something more of me than the eyes. He held me thus for an uncounted time, his eyes blindly remembering some long-gone day; he held me so long that my legs felt weak when he turned me loose, and he put a steadying hand once more on my shoulder. “And that you have from your father.”

I had nothing of my father’s. I had nothing of my mother’s too, not even knowledge of her name. Yet it seemed I had her eyes—her eyes that were the eyes of the King, and would he treat a bastard’s bastard so courteously? And now it seemed I had something of my father’s, some gift I had never seen. I felt my parents’ love surrounding me, pulling me as into some lethal patch of quicksand, making my mind—my mother’s quicksilver, treacherous mind—slow and dull. “Sire?”

He laughed that mirthless laugh again. “I’ve never pretended to be a hero,” he said, the old wolf who’d won his land and guarded it against all thieves, even though they be as strong as Kamsa. “But these old eyes can still recognise divine armour.”

He pushed me from him, and the waiting loneliness took grasp of me, wrapped me in its insidious grip so I felt truly alone, though three steps would have taken me into the arms of the man I could call grandfather. I could not have taken those three steps had there been a dagger pressed into my throat. It is never an easy thing, to know oneself one self, separate from the mass of companions who have seemed always an extension of the self—my brothers have never yet managed it, nor their cousins. For me the knowledge twisted from my knowledge of my parentage all the joy I would later bring to it—I was the son of Princess Kunti, it seemed; I was the son of a god, or at least of some hero grand enough to grant his son divine armour; but in that moment, in the cold light filtering in through the narrow windows, in the cold gaze of King Kuntibhoj, I was simply alone. Had he called me simply to tell me so, to rob me of my old identity and make it impossible for me to live in his palace as I had done? Then I remembered the chariot. Had she sent for me? He had turned his eyes from me in cold dismissal, and even in my anxiety to know I could not have forced his attention back—to this day, to me he remains the figure of the formidable, though I have seen wiser kings, and greater.

Perhaps he sensed my helplessness, perhaps he felt some emotion perilously close to pity—my mother told me, later, that he was not a cruel man, simply cold, simply careful of his honour. He looked back at me, once, his eyes raking me, leaving me feeling weighed and wanted. “Obey your mother,” he said, and, with the weight of a command, “honour her husband.”

I do not remember how long I stood there. I remember that the wolf under my grandfather’s right hand had a tooth more than its compatriot on the left. I remember that the index finger of his right hand had the callus archers get from forever pulling back the string—I have that callus now, as I have his eyes. I have something, too, of his stern demeanour, or so my mother tells me, and something of his deep love for justice. There is no reason this should be so—I haven’t the old man’s blood in me, nor a long history of acquaintance, to make me resemble and copy him, as many of his brother’s grandsons copy Pitamaha Bhishma. Perhaps he gave me something of his strength, as I stood teetering at the end of my meagre own. Perhaps he put my hand in his and led me to the door, taming the length of his steps to mine, crouching closer to my height, as I have seen the Pitamaha do with my brothers. I do not remember. I remember only the Dhai’s strong arms pulling me close, the scent of her clothes like the sharp innocence of jasmine, and her lips on my hair, on my forehead, whispering gratitude, murmuring relief. I remember only the heady sense of joy trampling my terror of venturing from the house of King Kuntibhoj, where I had lived out all my little life.


	2. Chapter 2

The charioteer was named Adhirath, and he was not really any longer a charioteer, though he had been one, most of the years he had been on the earth. Nearly all the years of my life he’d been living quietly in Anga on the pension his master had given him; he’d come out of retirement only for this task, only to take me to the mother who’d finally claimed me. Clearly none of his competence had deserted him, he pulled me in with the same ease he reined in the horses, and I reared and stamped as hard as they did.

Sometime in the day, as the hours wore on and my nurse neglected all her other charges in her quest to bathe and brush and dress and ornament me, my earlier dread had returned. I did not know, after all, what my mother would be like—all the stories of Princess Kunti centred around her beauty, and her virtue: stories of princesses always do, and yet I have never met two alike, though the stories would have us believe they are all the same. And even then, though I had met no princesses yet, an insidious unease wrapped me around, turned all my excitement into sullenness, until I stood clutching at my nurse’s aanchal while she oiled my curls into some semblance of order, full to sickness with the things I could not say—what if my mother were cruel? What if she had been forced to send for me? What if her husband were cruel? What if her co-wife decided to avenge a thousand real and imagined slights by tormenting me? How was I to live in a forest, who had never ventured out of the palace courts? All of this might yet have passed, might have made them fuss over me, might have made my nurse burst into fresh tears—she had been surreptitiously weeping all morning, and her misery fuelled mine. The truly unaskable question, the inarticulate dread that turned my palms clammy and my hair unruly, and my skin hot to the touch, was the question of a child much younger than I—what if she treated me as less than her sons? For I knew she had sons, the entire palace had rejoiced at the news of their births, and we children had feasted till we were sick of the sight of food. And I knew, too, that no bastard was ever treated as a child born in law to a spouse—those of my friends who knew they had fathers met them but rarely, though they might see them every day. My mother would never look at me with the same pleasure that would be in her eyes as they rested on my brothers; there would always be a hesitation in her voice before she introduced me to strangers—perhaps she never would, would let them think me a servant, or a slave; I would always be different, always be less. Bastardy had never worried me, while I was simply one face in a crowd of faces—if we had been outcasts, we had at least all been outcasts, the same negligence had been meted out to each one. To be a bastard among a clutch of pampered princes terrified me.

My brothers use me in negotiations—they are easy, these days, but they used to be difficult, they used to be for things far more precious than a tax levied on a subordinate ally, price of Pandava protection. My cousin says he can never read my thoughts in my eyes—a ridiculous statement, since his friend—and she untrained in the arts he mastered before I was a man—can split me to the core with one glance. Whatever the impenetrability of my visage, it is a learnt thing—my mother taught it me by example in the early years while her husband was alive; the court of Hastinapura refined what I had known already. At that age, at six and leaving for unknown terrain, my face must have shown all I felt. I could only explain Adhirath’s actions through pity, for certainly he cannot have liked being pulled from his home—for five years seems long, to a child of six—to cart around a boy nobody knew. And yet he was kindness itself to me, that whole long ride up to my mother’s home.

It is strange, now, that it seemed strange that the son of a Queen—the son of a god—was so treated by a servant, but I had never till then been someone it was advantageous to be kind to. And even then, with the palace abuzz with the news the women had long known, the cavalry my mother’s foster father sent to bring her eldest home to her barely deigned to look at me, spent more time with their horses than with me. I remember their faces, still, as I remember the faces of their sons, and the smiles they had given me when they had visited my friends—it is easier to be passingly kind to a misbegotten child, than to acknowledge him the fruit of a princess’ sins, yet these were men brave enough to allow women the indiscretions they allowed themselves. The women had been far kinder, but to the women I had always been one of their many children, all equally loved as though a hundred brothers from the same great womb—my mother in her youthful indiscretion was simply one of the hundred-headed, hundred-wombed mother that spawned the children in her father’s childless house.

That solitude of a hundred men pushed me daily to huddle daily nearer Adhirath, till I slept with my head pillowed on the swathes of his turban and my body bent into the concave curve of his. And every night he told me stories—my mother was too solemn and her husband too immersed in exile to tell me stories of his home, all my childhood knowledge of Hastinapura, all the stories I passed on to my brothers, came from half-sleeping memories of Adhirath’s voice crackling like the roaring watch-fires in the quiet nights. He spoke well. He spoke incessantly, till the voice that could command horses in battle grew hoarse, of the great lineage I was to be part of, of Dushyant and Shakuntala, of Puru and Yayati, of Yayati’s wives and of his lust for life, of Bharata and of his worthless sons. On the last of our first week of nights, he wrapped his great arms around me and put me to sleep with the tale of Santanu and Ganga. That a mother could slay her children seemed to shock him more than me—women from lesser homes will shield their men from these necessary horrors when they can, but in Kuntibhoj’s house they did not believe in lying to us about our luck in being kept alive—and it was only by remembering the divinity of the mother that he could excuse her deeds—for the gods can do no wrong. Her dalliance with the king, too, he adjudged unfit for my childish ears—how sheltered, to be Adhirath’s child—and only found his voice again when he spoke of Gangeya Devavrata.

All the next day he spoke to me of him, mingling stories of the man’s life with quieter words to his horses—of his astonishing childhood in the deeps and eddies of the river, of his myriad of teachers and how the student surpassed them all, of his father’s joyful rediscovery of the son he’d thought he’d lost, of the prince’s royal years in Hastinapura. As the sun faded and we set up camp, he held me beside him as he put his horses to sleep and whispered the story of Devavrata’s great renunciation, of his new naming. Now his voice grew in strength, and the younger of the cavalry rode closer and closer, faces set forward, ears straining to hear the tale. They had known, perhaps, some of his greater adventures—the damming of the river, the vow of renunciation, the abduction of the princesses—but they, like me, had never been told of the man still striving to keep alive his brothers’ family, serving every day the kingdom to which he should have been heir, and his sons after him, and then theirs. It seemed incredible that the boy who had dammed the Ganga with a flight of arrows would in the length of years numbered on the fingers of one hand grow into the youth who willed his life away to smoothen the path for his father’s amours—I heard our escort speculating, late into the night, the reasons a man might have to act in so foolish a manner. They themselves, men who considered themselves and were considered brave—who had been chosen for their unquestioning obedience to their captains and their king—could not imagine any such sacrificing impulse. Surely no Kshatriya would ever do so—sacrificing life was the province of the sage, of the maharishi with the fires of yoga burning in his belly, of the deformed beggar making his livelihood from the pity of others. One and all they thought it better to emulate Yayati.

Yet I could think, easily, of the little hero and the young renunciant as the same man; with a further push of the imagination I could even see him aging into the tireless selfless governor of Hastinapura—it is easy, at six, to dream of heroes; for me, unmoored from one life and with yet some hard swimming before the other bank hove into sight, it was easier than for most. I had never yet had a life which lay claims on me, and to be feted by the gods seemed a greater glory than any. It would change, of course—it changed within months, in the folds of my mother’s hair, in the smiles on my brothers’ faces, I found claims that anchored me to life—but for that perfect, fleeting moment to follow faithfully in Bhishma’s footsteps seemed the greatest splendour life could bring me. I caught some sight of it in Adhirath’s eyes as he sat telling me the story—he returned to it throughout the day, almost as punctuation, as beginning middle and end, as the anecdote that separated Bhishma’s life from the heroic deeds of others—some conspiratorial assurance that he knew how well I understood the subtle forces that drove Devavrata, that he was telling me the story and me alone—the others were merely an incidental audience, whose presence meant as little as their absence. I did not imagine that glance, that shared intimacy of thought. But Adhirath’s stories, like his hands on the reins, had been paid for, for King Pandu, desiring his wife’s eldest son to be brought to him, had also desired that the child be taught of the family that would claim him. This I learnt later, when I was asked, in a little way, to emulate Pitamaha Bhishma. That night, and the nights that followed, I simply thought him kind, to so ply me with stories—if I thought more of it, I thought only of the stories themselves; I spent all my dreams wandering in glittering halls and shadowed groves, I ventured even to the heavens in my thoughts—Brahma was a kinder Kuntibhoj, and Indra a more glorious general than my grandfather’s warlords.

As we left the plains in their stifling heat for the cooler reaches of the mountains, and the nature of the forests changed, Adhirath told me of Santanu’s later love, and the fisherwoman he’d brought home—not as concubine but as queen—and how well she’d graced that throne, offering the kingdom sons to usurp the place of the prince who’d bid her enter his father’s house. Two sons, and both dead in the first flowering of youth, and the kingdom without heirs, and Prince Devavrata set on keeping his vows of chastity. But there had been sons for the Queens he had won for his brother—and what a tale that victory made, and how well Adhirath spun it out—sons for Satyavati’s sons, bred by Satyavati’s son. He did not tell me then whose they were, and it was years before I learnt that tale, though I shall set it down now, and Pitamaha Bhishma had to tell it me when Maharishi Vyasa visited Hastinapura in my youth.

Of the sons Adhirath told me with an easier voice and heart, with affection gilding his words. These many nights he had told me the legends of the Kauravas, and his tone had been sombre with the awe of the living; but Ambika’s son, and Ambalika’s, he had seen growing to manhood, and raced their chariots for them, and gone to war with them. Them he spoke of with love, and of my mother’s husband more and better than of his brother. This had not been bought, or I’ve insulted Adhirath’s skills of dissimulation these many years, for he offered them with a slow smile, and nudged me closer before he spoke. Stories, not of King Pandu’s valour, but of his learned skill at archery, and how long he’d taken to master sword and spear and how he’d toiled to gain his uncle’s approval. The man he painted, in the wood-smoke and embers, behind my drooping lids, had glanced hopefully at my mother as she took careful steps down that row of princes, and reddened with joy when she placed the garland ’round his neck and herself in his hands. He was a king of summer morns in my mind, Pandu, golden like the sun in high splendour, and rosy like Aditya at dawn, my mother’s handsome bridegroom who drew love from all women and admiration from all men, for to see him was to love him—oh, not because he was beautiful, nor because he was brave, but because he so plainly wanted to be loved, because he demanded affection as openly as a child. So I saw him, like a youthful Shadanan who won kingdoms in play and gave them away in kindness, because he could not bear to see his brother unhappy—joyous like a spoilt child, and generous like one.

I should have loved him. Had I been any other child and he any other man, I would have loved King Pandu ere I ever laid eyes on him, so kind and good and handsome a man he seemed to me. I had loved all the great men and beautiful women Adhirath had told me of, even Yayati with his vast appetites, even Dushyant who denied his bride, all of Puru’s kin I had taken into my affections as I learnt their names and stories. Pandu I hated with a child’s implacable, unreasoning hatred—had he been a cruel man I would have disliked him less, for cruelty is natural to men who are cruel. This man was kindness itself—even at six I knew no man could willingly give his kingdom, and this very month my escort had taught me no Kshatriya would surrender his life even with a surety of return. And for five years he had lived with my mother while I was nobody’s child—while he had gone glowing back to Hastinapura with his bride, some nurse had put me to sleep for the pittance the palace accorded her, and this I could not forgive him. While I had known myself merely one of the palace children, I had pretended to care naught for my parents, nor for their neglect of me—even those of my friends who knew their fathers were raised by the palace nurses; these weeks of knowing myself a princess’ son had changed me already—though they ignored me, yet a cohort of horsemen had been assigned to me; I was bejewelled and bedecked, and the banner of King Kuntibhoj was carried before me, and Adhirath’s chariot bore the Hastinapura pennant. I had ceased to be inconsequential, and like all men of consequence I was ready, even so young, to fight for what should have been rightfully mine and yet had been snatched from me. That it might have been my mother’s will that kept me hidden in the women’s rooms, while she bore her husband other sons, was a thought I shied away from—it was plainly my mother who had asked that I be brought from obscurity to my true station, and surely she had yearned for me as I had longed for her, all unknowing? I put King Pandu’s name to all the bitterness of deprivation, to all the days and nights spent envious of those lucky few whose fathers bore them on their shoulders, whose mothers brought them toys and showered violent affection on them.

Then, too, I was afraid. My friends who had known their fathers had yet met them but rarely, and only a week after my sixth name-day a girl had come from her mother’s house back to the palace, where at least she had to serve only royalty, and not the children of her mother’s husband. My mother’s other sons were princes in earnest, and what would her husband have me do? This escort was King Kuntibhoj’s gift to the daughter he had reared, King Pandu had thought a lone chariot enough. So might a king order a confidential servant brought to him—King Pandu had another brother, Adhirath had told me, and though he was wise, and noble, no man had offered him a kingdom, or houses, or wealth; mayhap he wanted me to serve his sons as his brother served him.

I did not know, and it terrified me—much of that journey had scared me, for all its exhilarations, and as it drew to a close, the new life awaiting at the destination silenced me till none of Adhirath’s stories held aught of interest for me, and the night seemed a stalking predator. Only under the heat of the midmorning sun did I feel calm, like a child held secure in the strong arms of his father. The night the captain of my escort came to bid me a formal farewell I wept bitterly—he had never known my name, when I ran wild with his daughter, but to hear it in his strong familiar voice was enough now to bring me to tears. He had been distant, and brusque, and never had he spoken more than five words to me at a time, yet I had known him all my remembered life—Adhirath, for all his stories and all his practised affection, was a stranger of a month’s acquaintance. Even upon leaving the palace I had not cried so brokenly, for then the sun was pouring benediction on me, and I had only thought of the joys ahead—in the night I remembered all the joys I had so blithely forsaken, and how nobody would ever again call me Vasusena in such a gruff voice, in the lilt of my native tongue.

That last night of my month of nights I spent awake and alone, while the watch-fires roared in empty imitation of the sun, and Adhirath slept among his horses.


End file.
